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The Oldest Script
The Goose Quill; The
Searcher; The Bootlace; The Traveller; High Cut; The First Mark.
Six poems from a 'Year of the Artist' 2000 residency at Acton
Scott Historic Working Farm in Shropshire.
These poems first appeared in Spiked.
The Goose Quill
in memory of Ossie Morris
The hazel rod nosedives,
dead wood in your hands,
the pulse of water lost
to a blank face of rock.
It is the summer of '76
and the beasts are moaning
from thirst. You swing the stick
up along the side of the quarry,
pick away two or three stones,
and there is a wrinkle of water,
no thicker than a grub.
The farmer screws a goose quill
into the rock, leaves a bucket
to chirr all summer
with that thin piping.
We need these stories
as a generation goes
that had learned to hold on
by a thread. Old improviser,
remind us of the hidden pulses.
Tell us how to woo the earth
when it turns away.
The Searcher
for Tom Williamson
His bent back listens
to the weight
he has shouldered,
his hand to the foot
he has folded
into his lap. Hardness
under the thumb. Dead spot
in the give
of the hoof. And hidden
so the farrier must be
the conjuror
once more. In so deep
only the thin blade
of the searcher
can slip, a steeled nerve,
between the wall and the blood.
The Bootlace
for Vernon Warwick
Each summer, to mark his arrival,
his grandfather would stoop, draw the lace
from his boot and tie it to the bridle,
his braid of office. Six hands taller,
he would lead the Shire from the stable,
the staddle-stones of its hooves falling
into step, becoming the blood-beat
of a drum, a bass note through the earth
that seemed to muster under their feet,
the dark green brocade of the clover
in the homespun of the hay. They were
drawing the sun's cart, harvest heaped over
its yellow boards. The old man was a legend:
he could lift loads that broke the pikel,
haystorms the boy could scarcely tread-in
before the next blacked-out the roundel
of the loft. But what brings him to mind
is the bindertwine he had wound through
his boot: half-thrift, half-ceremony,
it gave a boy his most prized belonging,
his place in the harvest company.
The Traveller
for Andrew Lane
Poor traveller,
that never travels
Monk
of the circumference
making its only circuit,
it is trundled around the rim
of each new wheel, each return
of the chalk mark on its little wheel
counted off under the breath: one foot,
two foot, three
Vanishing term,
it sets up the equation
that has iron stretched in a ring of fire
and shrunk around a wheel over a water pit,
quarter of an inch smaller in circumference
for every foot of diameter.
Patient tuner,
it works towards a note
three woods can make on the stones of a yard:
elm of the hub, ash of the felloes, cleft oak of the spokes,
all driven together in a hoop of iron, all caught up
in the spring of a wheel.
High Cut
for Jim Elliott
Drawn like blades of earth, the ridges
catch light
out of a dull sky. Half-crouched, his arms wide
to the plough handles, a man stalks them as they shear
from the mouldboard. Every other pace
he halts the horses, takes a long spanner
from his back pocket and tightens the outrigging
of press wheel and boats, keels of metal that he draws
on chains, furrow-sharpeners that ride in his wake.
He is the first scribe, perfecting the oldest script.
All alphabets go back to tallies, harvest yields
scratched on clay. The first lines were the lines of increase.
And the shieldwall of books? Breathing spaces we won
when warrior farmers marked out their battleline,
their ridges exact, drawn like blades of earth.
The First Mark
for James Plant
'In blacksmithing
it's not the last mark
of the hammer
that shows
- it's the first
two or three blows.
Get those right, and
the rest of it flows.
Get them wrong, and half
the day goes,
fudging and finicking about'
- as if there is a knack
sudden as luck, a moment
when time can be turned
and the spear proves true
to its foreshadowing
on the wall of the cave
or the knapping of flakes
from a flint core gives us
the run of the earth.
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